Well in that case i apologise, but I know of no one else in that position and I think the forums would have been pretty red hot were there many others. I assume you have contacted IS, so what is their reason for not paying you what is owed?

Hmm, I'm not sure we're talking about the same bug. This one is from Jan 1-3rd, when my royalties were set back to 15% (i dont think everyone was affected). I meant to contact support but then i saw Sean posting in the forums that he still was waiting too; with a response from Kelvin the corrections for those would be there 'soon'.Sean, did you get yours corrected in the meantime?

Well in that case i apologise, but I know of no one else in that position and I think the forums would have been pretty red hot were there many others. I assume you have contacted IS, so what is their reason for not paying you what is owed?

Hmm, I'm not sure we're talking about the same bug. This one is from Jan 1-3rd, when my royalties were set back to 15% (i dont think everyone was affected). I meant to contact support but then i saw Sean posting in the forums that he still was waiting too; with a response from Kelvin the corrections for those would be there 'soon'.Sean, did you get yours corrected in the meantime?

I'm not occupying anything in Calgary except in August (when the chance of snow is lower - although still non-zero)

But they are going to have to do something about the inept and inaccurate handling of accounts. There's a lot of money going through their system every day and the leaky pipes are in urgent need of repair - IOW an audit is a good idea, but they need improved IT systems to handle money as a bank would. Accuracy to the penny, every time. Did they ever do anything about that stupid code that was miscalculating subscription royalties for (I think silver) because they were using floats? Or the "it's wrong but as it's a bit too much we aren't going to fix it" when the paid us the EL bonuses they had incorrectly removed too soon.

I don't suspect that their IT crew is any worse than any other microstock IT dept. But they're not sufficiently capable enough to handle the complex system istock HQ wants to employ. If they want to have the most complex and feature-rich site in the business, they need to have the best talent available for this sort of thing. Obviously they don't. Their IT folks may be good, but they might also not be of the caliber required to pull off the vision HQ has had for the site for years.

It's more an issue of knowing your limitations and working within them. Aside from the fact that such a complex site is probably not even giving them a competitive advantage anyway, a smart company knows when they're in over their heads and when to pull back on an aggressive development plan. istock will never admit that they can't do everything they want and keep things humming along smoothly, so they'll always stumble along like this with constant bugs and an almost monthly major issue cropping up.

I'm not sure that they aren't worse, from what I've seen, the IT dept in IS couldn't implement the changes we've seen over at SS - the map, tracking your sets, the darkroom features - certainly not smoothly and without a ton of new bugs being introduced.

There's nothing particularly difficult about showing this sort of data on a map or displaying statistics from a gallery. The gallery material can be quite easily reproduced on IS with a few greasmonkey scripts such as this one from Sean: http://www.istockphoto.com/forum_messages.php?threadid=271062&page=1 which is much more useful than the limited information on SS. There's a whole lot more data SS could give us, but they choose not to. The strength of the SS system is that its really simple, not that it employs any amazingly innovative features.

The complexity at iStock is from them trying to factor in search and purchase results in re-weighting new searches and making these more customised at a geographic or even user level, combining that ambition with a controlled vocabulary, and then trying to optimise the whole package to maximise the amount that customers spend. Throw into the mix that the whole site allows for statistics on a per image basis, different pricing structures that can change, commenting and rating on images, and direct communication between contributors and sellers, not to mention allows for a variety of file types, not just images and the sum total is a site that is a lot more complex than the other microstocks. Whether this is a good thing is debatable, but I think the previous comment is spot on.